When I was in middle school, I went to a state competition for debate. I needed an extra event so I decided to take up carpentry. I had to design something, completely by hand, that had proper use. When I was thinking about what to do, I decided that I wanted to build something that I needed, so even if I lost, I would still have something cool in my room. I decided that I needed yet another bookshelf. Fast forward to the end of the story, I ended up getting eighth place in the state for that bookshelf, and eight years later, it is still in my room, holding up my books.

I organized that bookshelf very methodically. The top shelf was books that I wanted to read. This shelf was always full. The next shelf was fiction books that I had finished. While this shelf should have been overflowing, I always traded in the books that I had read for new books to read. Essentially, this shelf became my favorite books. The final shelf was the barest, this was filled with non-fiction books that I had already read. I liked having books on this shelf to make myself seem adult. The genre of horror dominates my shelf. Some of the books are flipped over because the covers frighten me, but the stories rarely do. If you look at my bookshelf objectively, one would find psychological horror, thriller, romance, coming-of-age, short stories, and poetry. 

I want to start off by suggesting a book that is on my theoretical top shelf, the one I cannot wait to read. The book that is first on my top shelf is The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix. This book was suggested to me by a friend and is now the book I am scrambling to read. The plot, as far as I can tell, is about every single girl who survives an attempted murder. They meet to cope with their experiences and connect with one another, only to have someone come after them. 

The books that I have read hold a very special part in my heart. I remember where I was when I read them and every person who I forced to read them after. To save you from the torture of me listing every book that I have read and loved, I shall only share three. 

The first of which is H2O by Virginia Bergin. I read this book during a thunderstorm to pass the time, which was probably the worst idea that I could have had. This book takes place in a world where the rain is deadly. If the water touches you, it burns your skin, and if you’re unfortunate enough to get caught in a downpour, you die. The suspense comes through the pages, when it rains in the book, you can feel the fear of the characters. I flew through the book eager to know what was going to happen next.

The next book on my middle shelf is Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo. This book is a poetry collection following a young person finding themself through writing. As I read, I saw their life, I felt the way the speaker felt, and I hurt as much as they hurt. This is the best type of book. The ones where you are able to feel everything that the speaker feels. I was immersed. It is everything I love combined into one book.

The final book I have to share can be found on my theoretical middle shelf (it is no longer on the middle shelf of my bedroom bookcase). I’ve passed There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins around to nearly every person I’ve met, so much so, that I have lost track of who has it now. This book is not for the faint of heart. It is about a murderer who enters the characters’ houses and rearranges everything to show that they are the next on the hit list. After I read this, my sister, who never cleans, decided to clean, and I truly believed that I was the next target. This was one of those books that I could not put down. I brought it everywhere, just so I could finish it faster. 

I know I left out the books on the bottom shelf, but those are the rejects, and not nearly good enough to recommend to others. Although the bookshelf I made all those years ago can only hold so many books, my brain is an infinite bookcase, waiting to be filled with new reads.

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Zoe Sweet is a writer, editor, and intern located in Chester, PA. She serves as the editor of Widener Ink, Widener’s literary journal, writes for The Blue and Gold, and is an intern at SAFTA. She is currently studying Political Science and English with hopes of one day being a judge.

Sundress Publications announces the release of this year’s free, downloadable Craft Chaps by Joshua Nguyen and Cynthia Guardado.

From self-publishing scams to academic presses, Joshua Nguyen explains the pitfalls and pleasures of the publishing world in Hidden Labor & The Naked Body: Work They Don’t Prepare You For After Publication. Useful examples of tax spreadsheets and promotion calendars are balanced with provocative writing prompts such as creating an ekphrastic poem about your own author photo or writing an unprofessional author bio listing all your insecurities. With humor and practical advice, Nguyen takes writers step-by-step through what they will have to become (accountant, social media manager, fundraiser, booking agent), while easing the anxieties of post-publication life.

Part lyric poem, part memoir, part workbook, Memories We Never Had: Writing in a Postcolonial Existence lays a path for interrogating personal and political histories. Cynthia Guardado destabilizes memory, queering the past to reveal that what we do not remember is as important as what we do: last words not spoken, questions not asked, wars not fought, yet whose consequences can be felt for generations. By constructing their own, chosen pasts, writers can build a present moment and a future to counter oppressive, white, academic, and literary standards often internalized within oneself.

Download them for free on the Sundress website here!

Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and winner of the 2022 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbook American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is the Wit Tea co-editor for The Offing Mag, the Kundiman South co-chair, a bubble tea connoisseur, and loves a good pun. He is a PhD student at The University of Mississippi, where he also received his MFA.  

Cynthia Guardado (she/her/hers) is a Los-Angeles born queer Salvadoran poet and professor. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Cenizas, (University of Arizona Press, 2022) and ENDEAVOR (World Stage Press, 2017).

Sundress Publications announces Heather Bartlett’s debut poetry collection, Another Word for Hunger, a spare, honest, and tender debut that nimbly contemplates the complications of love, mother/daughter relationships, loneliness, religion, sex, misogyny, queerness, and gender.

At its essence, this collection is about desire and love, and the ways the two intersect—and don’t. Short poems with short lines that cut with their sharp precision, this collection begins in adulthood and intimacy before journeying back to a time when notions of heteronormativity are challenged and examined. Here is a spectrum of formative experience: “someday I will learn / what it means to want more / woman she says …”

Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, says, “The poems in Heather Bartlett’s Another Word for Hunger, their movements confident and precise, explore the intricacies of desire, memory, and perspective—and the ways language can both fail us and save us. What an exciting debut collection!

Pre-order your copy of Another Word for Hunger here.

Heather Bartlett (she/her) is a poet, writer, and professor. Her poetry and prose can be found in print and online in journals such as the Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, RHINO Poetry, and others. She holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College and is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the State University of New York College at Cortland, where she teaches in the Professional Writing Program and directs Cortland’s visiting writers series, Distinguished Voices in Literature. She is the founding editor of the online literary magazine Hoxie Gorge Review.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts at Firefly Farms, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is seeking a Nonprofit Management intern for a six-month position. Each part-time position would consist of approximately 5-10 hours of work per week and run from June 30th, 2023 to January 5th, 2024. All applicants must be local to the greater Knoxville, TN area.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is an entirely volunteer-run organization that hosts residencies, workshops, and retreats centered on creative writing in all genres. Located on a 45-acre farm twenty minutes from downtown Knoxville, SAFTA’s mission is to give writers of all levels a chance to work with nationally renowned professionals in their field as well as uninterrupted time to focus on their creative work.

The Nonprofit Management intern’s responsibilities include the preparation of documents necessary to run an independent writer’s residency, such as writing press releases, composing blogs, fundraising, collating editorial and residency data, research, upholding SAFTA values, and more.  The intern will also be needed to help facilitate Zoom and in-person events.

Preferred qualifications include:

• Fluency in interpersonal communication

• Strong written communication skills

• Experience with WordPress, Zoom, Google Sheets, and/or other online mediums

While the internship position is unpaid, our staff gain real-world experience in working with online event planning, nonprofit management, running a residency, communications, and more while creating a portfolio of work for future employment. SAFTA staff work alongside members of both the local and national literary community through workshops and readings, which staff are able to attend for free during their tenure with the organization.

To apply, please send a resume and a brief cover letter detailing your interest in the position to the Staff Director, Z Eihausen, at saftastaffdirector@gmail.com. Applications are due by Monday, June 5th, 2023.

For more information, visit our website at www.sundressacademyforthearts.com

Ahead of the release of Lessons in Bending, author Jonaki Ray and Editorial Intern Amber Alexander sat down to discuss duality, survival, loss, and how science lends itself well to Ray’s personal storytelling. 

Amber Alexander: Lessons in Bending is not only the title of the collection but the first poem as well. Can you speak to the importance of this phase for both respectively?

Jonaki Ray: You have started this interview with a great question! The title of the collection, Lessons in Bending, is the same as that of the first poem because the phrase represents the essence of both. Those who are powerless, like the narrator in the first poem, learn that survival sometimes means somehow remaining unbroken; the world also teaches, through various inequities, who has the power versus who is powerless and has to bend, metaphorically or literally. I was also inspired to keep the collection with the same title because the poems represent the voice of those who are voiceless—the incarcerated, refugees, migrants, and immigrants—who learn these lessons, and yet, remain resilient.

AA: Can you speak to the recurring motif of freedom and forgiveness? How do these two intwine themselves within this chapbook? Where do they come into conflict?

JR: One of the most moving experiences of my life was traveling through Vietnam and Cambodia—it inspired the poem, “Killing Trees,” of this collection. At a place where the Khmer Rouge regime imprisoned people, one of the survivors could be seen sitting at the gate, and despite (or perhaps because of) what he has been through, he spoke about forgiveness. This stayed in my thoughts, and the poems in this collection swirl around the idea of forgiveness and how forgiving can be freeing. Yet, the paradox of life remains that forgiveness is nearly impossible, especially when there isn’t a single entity or symbol to forgive, and the inequities are systemic rather than personal. That is when these motifs come into conflict.

AA: Your poetry explores a number of different forms, lineation, and structures. Does your experimentation with structure and structureless poems in this collection serve to tell a bigger story and its complexities—for example, the rigidness of “Six Feet” compared to the chaotic lineation of “You Will be Saved”? Does “Evacuation” tell a visual story and, if so, can you elaborate?

JR: I have recently started using different forms and visual poetry because they offer so many more ways, at least for me, for expression. Another reason for these varied forms is that I often start a poem based on an image or something that has moved me that evokes a visual response to me. For instance, the poem, “Evacuation,” came about because of the news and images during the evacuation from Kabul recently. The words and space represent the idea that as refugees, or former citizens trying to get evacuated, the first idea that evaporates is that of citizenship. The iconic and visceral image of bodies falling from the planes that are taking off without them represented the lack of empathy and dehumanization of those who need the most compassion and help. I tried to express that concept through the free-falling words on the page. In contrast, “You Will be Saved” represents the chaos and hurt of people, especially women of color, who are caught in the vicious cycle of shelters, abuse, and incarceration, and often slip through the cracks in the system.

AA: In “Two Hundred Thousand,” there is urgency and desperation within the repetition. Would you speak about the process of creating the purposefulness of this, and what the most important take away you have from this piece specifically?

JR: The cyclic nature of history and the ebbing and flowing of who is considered a citizen and who an immigrant are fascinating topics for me. This particular poem showcases the fact that while around World War II, two hundred thousand people were deported from Paris, history keeps repeating, and even today, there are people who are not the “correct” color or citizenship and are being sent “back” or deported. The rhythm came naturally when I started writing this poem.

AA: How did the influence of nature find a way into Lessons in Bending and the overall story you tell? I’m thinking of examples like “The peak of summer temperature is / measured by how fast tears evaporate.” from the poem “A Mirage at the Border,” forget-me-nots in “99,” and titles such as “The Killing Trees” and “Dandelion Time.”

JR: Nature is inevitably linked to injustice because again, the devastating effects of droughts, floods, and deforestation, and climate change, for instance are also impacting those who are powerless the most, whether it is someone considered outsiders, migrants, or women and children. I try to bring out these parallel threads through interweaving nature into my writing.

AA: This collection tells many different stories with common themes such as home, loss, yearning, and belonging. How does the power of storytelling inspire you, especially with these poems and these themes?

JR: Storytelling came to me fairly recently—I studied science and while I was always an avid reader, I was more comfortable with the world of observation and data. However, I realized that there is a science to storytelling, too, especially if I want to distill my ideas into concise words, or want my readers to imagine the story in their minds as they read my words. As I mentioned earlier, as poets and writers, we are both witnessing and testifying to what is happening around us through our words. Stories are also what help us realize that all of us have a commonality when we think about loss, belonging, yearning, and searching for home. Another aspect to storytelling is that all these themes have their associated traumas, and it is a powerful and therapeutic way of dealing, or attempting to deal, with those.

AA: Do any one of your pieces speak to you the most?

JR: I can’t choose any one piece—they all speak to me because there is a part of me in each of them!

Lessons in Bending is available to download for free on the Sundress website

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